yeah like the architecture of the oldest house is immediately 10x as striking as anything in Quantum Break was but I also really like games with incredibly strong sense of place so
I had a permanent, constipated grimace on my face
is never more than three blocks from my thoughts
having a menu dedicated to listening to max payne’s thoughts on a variety of topics has instantly moved this game to the top of my list for 2019
Launch ability feels real good. Gravity gun good levels of feel. Game is starting to cook.
one of the most challenging parts of this game is not accidentally opening the control panel when trying to launch it
I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE SOUND EFFECT THAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PSYCHICALLY PICK UP OBJECTS
it is my favorite sound in videogames right now, that SCREAMING WHOOSH its like the last thing you hear before getting hit by a BART train its so good
the sound design in general is top notch
I’ve been playing with headphones and sometimes I have to purge a room of all the floating people just to get rid of the whispers.
another thing that distinguishes it from a lot of contemporary thirpses and which I think Cuba was reacting to in quantum break is that it did a lot with a relatively limited verb set – you can stun armoured enemies with headshots and you can take cover just by getting behind things. it’s refreshing!
Remedy is to pistols what '90s id was to shotguns
I feel like there’s a general design philosophy here of making everything as obvious and immediate as possible, like the character movement is abnormally smooth and responsive to WASD considering how complex the animation is, there’s almost no stickiness, and (unlike in quantum break where it didn’t really feel right to me) it’s of a piece with the strikingly clean level geometry (like the early 2000s upscaled) and the keycard level design
it’s great
Something about the difficulty on this seems really off. Like, it trucks along easy breezy for a long time, and then you’ll run into something like the Clog where it does a huge ton of damage in a hurry and you’re more likely to die outright if you’re standing in the wrong spot, but if you are playing the way they mean for you to play, you’re in practically no danger.
I dunno; it feels like the health bar could be tuned up a little better to make this occupy more of a middle ground between “I am not being challenged” and “I am learning by dying”.
The things I tell you will not be wrong
but they may lessen your enjoyment:
Given that there aren’t difficulty settings, I’m positive Remedy is leaning entirely on their auto-adjusting difficulty. Die a few times and it will probably course-correct into something easier.
and the map and open level design is unfussy and unforced, it just trusts the player to get where they need to go on their own
Games trusting players! there may be hope yet
this is actually the first game I’ve played in ages where I’ve never felt like I needed difficulty settings at all, it seems really well tuned for me personally anyway
I figured that had to be it, the absence of any explicit difficulty setting is very striking
It’s less than ideal but they were pioneers of it and it’s in keeping with the drive to simplify a bunch of things.
it’s a very pure shooter, pretty much all the narrative and gear stuff gets out of your way as much as possible. even neudoom and neuwolf have a lot more extraneous elements to them.
I just ran up and down the main atrium in the research sector triggering like a dozen groups of enemies and piling up upgrade points, and that huge space is incredible. it feels much more like a next generation game than I expected, I’m not surprised it doesn’t run so great on consoles.